


The Nomad's Dream

by Vnutrenni



Category: District 9 (2009)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 05:02:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/38077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vnutrenni/pseuds/Vnutrenni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Try to remember that it won't always be like this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Nomad's Dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Basingstoke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Basingstoke/gifts).



Christopher does not think of himself as a caretaker. He is not one of those, and he knows it because he is not registered with MNU as the legal guardian of any children or dependants; the Little One is much older than the humans’ cited age-of-majority, after all, and even aboard the spawnship Christopher was not permitted to provide duty care for the unformed instars, the new generation in stasis. Parenthood, the right to have contact with offspring, is the highest privilege he can imagine. He has kept all of the old papers and records of identity assigned to him at the Landing Care Center outside Johannesburg simply to look at them sometimes, at the questions like _Do you have children?_ because it is almost as if they mistook him for a progenitor. He is amazed and strangely flattered to be asked such a thing, even in ignorance.

The true progenitor living near him is precious and beautiful. Christopher does not know how to articulate this properly. He wants to say to him: _you are an architect, ancestor, you are the voice of the past speaking to the future, wise and rare; you are one of the last_. He _has_ said it, in fact, but the progenitor has been damaged by so much time spent away from the vivid dream network of the instars’ tentative first thoughts; his mind is dull, he mocks his own brilliant pheromone markings with the brightest yellow pigments he can find, and he lingers around the Little One - matured out of the first metamorphosis, and therefore unresponsive to the gentle tides of teaching - with an abstract sense of purposelessness and uncertainty.

Aching, Christopher attempts to give him objectives but the progenitor’s ineptitude in other fields of work is frustrating. He is not good at sorting objects by their visual characteristics. He is not physically strong. He does not know how to communicate clearly with other People, not even using the crude spoken-word dialect developed in the slums. Faded and forgetful, he smears himself with paint and scavenges in the garbage heaps for things that gleam like the shell of a newborn. His shanty is full of curved glass and melted plastic and small pieces of wood that he has scratched smooth on all sides. Each of these objects has a name. He has named them all and still has no title or epithet of his own.

Christopher does not think of himself as a caretaker, but he has struggled and he has survived. He has rebuilt a launch pod without the help of engineers. He has mapped the distance between the Earth star and the coordinates for home without navigational tools or training. He will adapt to new tasks as they arise. If there is anything to be said of this piercing white world with all of its sky and sky and sky gnashing its mandibles of storm cloud and atmosphere, Christopher will say that it is a place that harbours change. It changes things, this Earth; it changes him, perhaps for the better.

He will watch over the Little One and the progenitor.

He will learn how to take care of them.


End file.
